> Without Growl I do not know that we would have any sort of decent notification system in OS X
They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years.
Apple folks: take note. These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.
There’s one issue, which is that of “Sherlocking” a third-party solution with a first-party implementation. Then there’s another, which is having an open enough system to support such innovations in the first place.
Something like Growl, or f.lux (mentioned down-thread) could never have come about if macOS had been as restrictive as iOS. I have little doubt that we’ve missed at least a few such innovations over past decade, especially on the iPad, due to this.
While the Mac will likely never, despite some tireless predictions, go fully locked-down, little things like the deprecation of kernel extensions will chip away at this from the Mac side as well. Market-driven innovation and platform control are a difficult balance, but they are ultimately a zero-sum game.
It's interesting to think about the fact that, now that Macs are starting to be differentiated more by hardware (again, due to Apple Silicon) than software, Apple might actually allow more tweaking/low-level access to do interesting stuff.
> These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side.
I think it actually goes a little further. Growl is (was) a fantastic notifications system, but it wouldn't have succeeded without the healthy ecosystem of third-party programs that were willing to use it. When I installed it, long long ago, everything I wanted notifications from suddenly supported them. If the developers hadn't been talking to each other, it wouldn't have worked.
That’s really the key to our success with it, but it’s more. When a user found out about Growl and liked it, then they would request one or two app devs to add it. Those app devs did, the. Their users got it. Rinse and repeat. So it’s both developers and users who made it possible.
How should Apple have handled this? Maybe insisted on acquiring the Growl company? I don't think Apple should have just avoided building Notification Center, since that's a big net benefit for everyone.
If an acquisition is rejected/infeasible/not applicable/etc, then I'm not clear on the right thing to do. Acquisition might have been possible with Growl, but for some other cases there's not even a company to acquire. Have any other big platforms done this well?
(Apple's acquisition of Workflow which became Shortcuts seems like a case where they did this well)
I don't think OPs frustration was with 'sherlocking' Growl, but with Apple's stance on iOS and the increasing 'lockedownedness' of MacOS.
The MacOS community, and I think many MacOS developers accept that 'sherlocking' is a thing and I see it as something that should be a point of pride for these developers: "we built something so good that Apple decided to rip it off" one oft cited Steve Jobs (through Picaso) quote of course being "good artists copy, great artists steal". But I do understand developers who are frustrated by this happening to their apps, and don't begrudge them for it, especially when it is their source of income.
Do people get tweak-y with their systems as much any more?
I used to get extremely into customizing Mac OS (as in, Classic Mac OS), and early versions of OS X and iOS during the jailbreak salad days.
Now, not so much. I tend to run closer to stock, and not deal with the system constantly changing and deprecating my tweaks. Is that because I am old, or is it less common now? (Not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.)
It’s us. I was the same, now when I have a fresh Mac (like at work) I like to grab my dot files, my ssh keys, and remove a few items from the dock and I’m good to go. I don’t even do the last that much since I mostly launch from Spotlight.
It's similar to people building their own computer rigs. I built my own computers when I was younger and broke. It was cheaper to buy the parts and do the build yourself than it was to buy an off the shelf solution. It's also a great way to learn about the computer. As I got older, I would still lean toward building computers. However, today, I have way more responsibilities to be building the hardware, and my time is way too valuable to care about doing that myself. I just need the damn thing to work, and when it doesn't, there's a person to contact about resolving the situation. Between work, family, hobbies, etc, I have chosen to no longer care about these customizations/tweaks. There's really nothing different today for me to learn about a computer by doing the build myself: cpu, ram, bus, i/o controllers, etc. The core fundamentals are the same, just tech and speed has changed. My current devices have stock backgrounds. Rarely do I see my desktop as I have too many windows open doing actual work.
TL;DR I too care much less about this, but understand why others do. I encourage them to keep doing it even if I don't personally spend time with it.
I feel like Launchbar, which I believe predates Quicksilver, is pretty great. It’s true Quicksilver really perfected that motif of doing custom search operators and file manipulation, but Launchbar is really great.
Just curious..what is it you find lacking about Alfred? I swapped a few years ago when QS was having some wobbles with releases keeping up with Mac OS releases. I forget what the exact issues were at the time. It took about 3 months to find and replace my QS workflow but now I love it.
Hopefully Linux will be the operating system to benefit from increased development. I simply don't understand why developers keep investing their time on platforms that are openly hostile to them.
> I simply don't understand why developers keep investing their time on platforms that are openly hostile to them.
It's because the users are there. It's similar to things like YouTube. Every YouTuber complains about YouTube... but there is no other place where their random video is going to be recommended to a million strangers. (Twitch is similar.) So, they put up with it.
It boils down to what problem you want to solve. If you can figure out how to convince Mac users to switch to Linux, then you can be successful in your approach of "ditch Apple for being evil" or whatever. If you can't, then you have to find a new line of work (there is plenty of software engineering to be done that never touches an Apple product), or you have to put up with the poor developer experience.
It's also unlikely to be sunshine and roses on the other side of the fence. For everything that's bad about platform X, platform Y probably has just as many annoyances. If you're looking for perfection, you're going to have to remake the world in your image from scratch. That's a lot of work!
f.lux had major problems. There was some sort of weird issue that seemed like they were not unpremultiplying colors before shifting the colors, so you'd get these weird blobs of color that either didn't have the color shift applied or were just the wrong color in the middle of videos. It was quite annoying.
I actually really truly hope this happens. I want to see the same sort of love macOS gets from developers, showered on some/any open source OS (e.g. on some Linux/FreeBSD/etc distro).
I've been using Linux for nearly two decades, since I was 12 years old. (I still remember the excitement of installing Linux dual boot on my parents' PC years ago.)
I've been wishing and waiting for the age of the Linux desktop to come. It feels like it's so close, yet so far away.
(I've also been contemplating the benefit of me sinking the time into creating yet-another distro of my own -- one that's a lot different, built upon the features from NixOS and GoboLinux -- a distro that can hopefully be a truly compelling OS to wide range of folks...)
For the record I'd love this too, I just don't see it happening anytime soon.
I've been thinking about this recently I'm not not sure the (vocal) Linux community would accept what it might take.
* Developers want to work on projects that interest them and provide a benefit to others.
* However, developers also want to make a good living so they need an audience willing to pay money and make it worth the time it takes to polish something to a decent finish.
* Some developers would prefer to keep their code closed-source.
(Again the vocal) Linux community all to often comes across as everything should be not only be free open-source also free to buy - it's almost a dirty word if you charge for software.
Additionally on the Apple-side of things:
* There's a culture of what constitutes a good app, it drives a certain perfectionism to the final polish that you rarely see in linux desktop apps. Personally I've not seen a huge amount of apps on linux that cater for different user audiences. As technical aware users we vastly over-estimate the amount of technical knowledge and patience an average user has to figure something out.
* Apple is now offering an audience from a multitude of devices. You can build your app for a watch, phone, tablet or desktop. e.g. if someone buys your app on the iPhone they are more likely to be interested in your apps for other devices so there's more opportunity to cross-sell.
Ubuntu is probably the closest I see to being able to set some proper direction here. But I've yet to see them double-down and really set their mind to it, they seem to set a direction hold for while then back-down and go another direction. From the outside, it seems like anytime they've really tried to do something different or _the horror_ make some money it seems to just rile up the vocal linux community.
> Apple folks: take note. These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.
It doesn't matter when some developers condone the forces that take advantage of them because of incentives(stockholders) or general apathy.
> Apple folks: take note. These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.
I've recently come to a shift on mentality and believe that such sentiments are meaningless. It's almost always the most parasitic and immoral of the players that succeed and continue to succeed. The worse they can treat the other parties, generally the better off they are. It's like a deer telling a lion it should consider eating more grass.
Yeah it sucks cause we're generally in the camp that is being taken advantage of. But due to the forces of capitalism and human nature, you can practically mathematically prove that your words will not be heeded, and to great great profit.
Was Spaces an app before it was a feature? Currently I'm using third party software to pretend I have Spaces instead of the awful thing that replaced it.
What are you using our of curiosity? I used to use the amazing TotalSpaces but with recent versions of OSx it was no longer able to work. Now I've just gotten used to OSx's shite version but I really miss using a grid
How do you send a notification now without Growl? Each time I try to google for a tutorial, they all say “just use growl.” Ultimately I gave up and installed growl, and it works quite nicely.
I’d just like to pop up a notification programmatically via a bash script. :)
I'm using Pushover (https://pushover.net/) to send notifications to my Apple devices. To make use of it easier on command line I wrote a simple Python script which I've found to be very useful for things like allowing Transmission to send notifications when a download is finished or in scripts that do backup jobs which take a long time, letting me know when my Mac has booted, etc... Reply to this comment if you're interested in my script (note that the pushover site has good examples of how to call their API).
Similar things happened with most of the popular jailbreak utilities for iPhones. Custom backgrounds, app icons, ... really all of the successful modifications were eventually pulled into iOS.
Right. iOS was very feature-anaemic for its first 6-ish years. I switched to the iPhone in 2011 after being a faithful PocketPC/Windows Mobile user for more than a decade - but I had to jailbreak my iPhones to get the system tweaks from Cydia that I felt I really needed - things like a Today screen, AdBlock, raw file system access for exchanging files with my PC (and for getting my data out of oppressively siloed applications, etc.)
Since iOS 8 the system has had most of that functionality baked-in or is officially supported by Apple’s APIs for third-party devs. The only real things I feel I’m missing out right now on iOS 14 is raw FS access and easy sideloading.
Shouldn't that be anticipated though? The developers at Apple (or any developer in general) cannot possibly think of every little thing that user might want to do with their device. That's why nothing stays at v1.0 for very long. Users report bugs, and even make requests (however that might look). Any developer not looking to incorporate these requests will see their product wither and die.
Sure, sometimes a 3rd party comes along and makes a great product that once it is used, it feels like it is just something that should have always been there. Apple being Apple, they are going to want full control, so if they can't acquire the tool to do what they want, you know they will develop it internally. Every tech company does this. FB/Snap/Insta/etc have all borrowed/stolen/re-implemented.
There aren't really that many ways to do notifications.
If you want something that pops up on a large screen but isn't overly intrustive, a rectangle with text in it in the corner next to a menu icon to control them is what you're going to come up with.
And if you're Apple it'll be a rounded rectangle.
And Apple absolutely did not rip off Growl "pixel for pixel", the visual styles are totally different. I don't know where you even got that from?
Not only that, but Apple already had a similar feature in MacOS 8 and 9 that Growl was reproducing in OS X. It seems like Apple just hadn't gotten around to putting it in OS X yet because other things were more important. Then eventually they had time and added it.
> They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago.
I _think_ when Growl came out it was an open-source implementation of a notification UX that Apple had already demoed, either as a prototype or in some first-party apps, but it's just a vague memory. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
And locking the OS behind a gilded cage and not letting developers tinker. I’m done with MacOS as of Big Sur. M1 is massively intriguing but I am done with macs for a while. Over half of my companies 2018 macs had battery bloat and broken keyboards. Bloat breaks the keyboard. Half! It’s a real shame. I can’t abide by it anymore, as a developer I feel shunned by the OS now.
I’m not sure I’m following this comment, the vast majority of those Macs are being purchased to run macOS, and macOS is immeasurably better because of developers making things like Growl.
Note that Apple has dropped hints that they’d like users to move from macOS to iOS (“what’s a computer?”). Third party developers can’t build anything like Growl on iOS. There are a lot of reasons I don’t think Apple will ever be able to replace macOS with a closed system like iOS, but at least one of them is simply that a system as closed as iOS will inherently have a low ceiling for innovation (not enough room to innovate on the platform) therefore this innovation will be channeled into other platforms.
In other words, I think developers building features like Growl for macOS is highly relevant to the success of M1 Macs.
Is this actually true? Notifications were in iOS way before OSX, and it seems like that is the actual implementation that eventually made its way into Mountain Lion.
I mean, Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl. It was nice software but this seems like hyperbole lol
Edit: also, IIRC Growl was originally called "Notification Center", which is the name that Apple later used for their implementation of similar features
Double edit: I should've RTFA which mentions my fun fact
I first got into the Mac eco system in the mid 2000s, so I don’t know the entire history of notifications there, but I remember that Growl was pretty much the defacto Mac standard by the late 2000s.
Growl and a particular packaging software that provides auto updates had basically become a prerequisite for Mac apps at a certain point.
It’s possible Apple independently arrived at a design for how to present iOS notifications that just happened to resemble growl in every way... but it’s not likely. Growl was so pervasive before macOS notifications that it’s inconceivable to me that developers at Apple weren’t presenting it as a proven model.
Seemingly indispensable apps/applets/desk accessories that were either made unworkable by security changes, Sherlocking, or just the changing services we use. (Just look at those Adium services, and wistfully remember when XMPP was everywhere.)
I sorely miss Adium. I’ve learned to accept that I just have half a dozen mostly feature compatible chat apps open to communicate with the people who use them... but Adium was a real gem. I had it configured to minimal everything and never thought about what protocol I was using. Just a consolidated list of people and a tiny window with active chats in tabs. I’ve seen several attempts at unifying the current chat landscape and they all just look like gigantic webviews of the underlying frontend. What a step back!
Oh wait, I’m still using Adium. I had no idea it was no more. Admittedly, we only use it at home, over bonjour. My wife and I use it to exchange interesting links and the occasional file. It shows its age, but still works (most of the time) for this purpose.
Hear hear. Adium was almost a vision of how things could have gone. Now I have five different dedicated desktop chat apps, four of which run in Electron-based abominations (driving up CPU and GPU utilization) plus Apple Messages. It's a disgrace. The days when I could have AIM, FB messenger and GChat all side-by-side in a native app are missed.
Oh Haxies, I remember writing run-time patches (aka, cracks) to bypass licensing/registration for several pieces of software. There was a common framework, whose name no eludes me, that could be almost universally patched giving access to tens (100s?) of software.
I would still be using Adium today if they had made it a fully featured Matrix client. I moved to Element instead, which is nice, but I always liked Adium's UX better.
Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.
Growl was one of the projects that made me fall in love with the Mac. The themes, the ability to script to it in the PWA precursors I used to build (SSBs), and the easy way to plug it into your own apps. It was a core part of what made Mac apps in the Delicious Generation so special and so much better than apps on any other OS. I still think apps of that vintage are the height of good desktop application development.
When Growl moved to the Mac App Store, the writing was on the wall. I was so happy the team had a way to support themselves but the changes being made in Mac OS X (then known as OS X), even before Notification Center, definitely made stuff harder. After Notification Center and its adoption/similarity, and with the way macOS continued to restrict kernel extensions/modifications/plugins, it stopped being used as much by others. It ended up becoming difficult to install/run, and I gave up a few years ago, even though that meant some of my custom tools would no longer work the same way.
Huge kudos to the developers and the community. Seventeen years is a hell of a run.
Super innovative, internet-organized, open source project ahead of its time. I have a special place in my heart for it, too — back when I first started working for myself, and at home, in ‘06-07, I would run Twitteriffic with every incoming tweet posting to Growl. The frequency was low enough that this was not a distraction and every tweet was meaningful. At that time, pretty much all of my followed accounts were also indie, work-at-home Mac devs, and it was a virtual water cooler of sorts. Really was a huge part of me adjusting to working alone and working at home, but still feeling part of a group as the notifications faded by...
Oh, I remember this thing. It felt like an essential part of the system before native notifications were introduced, and then was promptly forgotten. Literally every single app that had notifications used it — with the notable exception of Apple's own ones. Coming from Windows, where every app implemented its own notifications that looked inconsistent and overlapped each other, this was a night and day difference.
I know, but these didn't really work for stuff like instant messaging, and only one could be displayed at a time system-wide, so everyone made their own thing.
Oh wow, I totally forgot about the XP speech bubbles! Did any useful application ever use them? I only remember obnoxious AV warnings and Windows messages ("you can click here to re-open me!") IM notifications may not have been bad.
Reminds me of the story of a guy who gets flown out to meet with Microsoft about an acquisition for his extremely useful Windows program, but they never follow up. Instead, they just rip-off his idea verbatim and integrate it into the OS.
It was a lot of fun back then. There was the c4 stuff and drunkenbatman and then open source stuff. A lot of fun to be had. I don’t see it a lot anymore
I loved growl. There was an iOS app called Prowl that used the growl notification system that I used in a past life to alert me if things in production were weird without me manually checking all the time. Good memories. Thank you Growl!
Readit News
They are right to say this, as the current Notifications system in OS X is ripped nearly pixel-for-pixel from Growl's implementation a decade ago. Like Spaces, Quicksilver, Cover Flow and others, Growl paved the way for a lot of the usability enhancements OS X gobbled up in recent years.
Apple folks: take note. These are real, material examples of the benefit brought by developers being on your side. Shun them as you have in recent years and you might find another OS starts to benefit from their weekend projects and innovative ideas.
Something like Growl, or f.lux (mentioned down-thread) could never have come about if macOS had been as restrictive as iOS. I have little doubt that we’ve missed at least a few such innovations over past decade, especially on the iPad, due to this.
While the Mac will likely never, despite some tireless predictions, go fully locked-down, little things like the deprecation of kernel extensions will chip away at this from the Mac side as well. Market-driven innovation and platform control are a difficult balance, but they are ultimately a zero-sum game.
Admittedly the pool of developers was restricted to those who were able and cared to jailbreak...
I think it actually goes a little further. Growl is (was) a fantastic notifications system, but it wouldn't have succeeded without the healthy ecosystem of third-party programs that were willing to use it. When I installed it, long long ago, everything I wanted notifications from suddenly supported them. If the developers hadn't been talking to each other, it wouldn't have worked.
If an acquisition is rejected/infeasible/not applicable/etc, then I'm not clear on the right thing to do. Acquisition might have been possible with Growl, but for some other cases there's not even a company to acquire. Have any other big platforms done this well?
(Apple's acquisition of Workflow which became Shortcuts seems like a case where they did this well)
The MacOS community, and I think many MacOS developers accept that 'sherlocking' is a thing and I see it as something that should be a point of pride for these developers: "we built something so good that Apple decided to rip it off" one oft cited Steve Jobs (through Picaso) quote of course being "good artists copy, great artists steal". But I do understand developers who are frustrated by this happening to their apps, and don't begrudge them for it, especially when it is their source of income.
I used to get extremely into customizing Mac OS (as in, Classic Mac OS), and early versions of OS X and iOS during the jailbreak salad days.
Now, not so much. I tend to run closer to stock, and not deal with the system constantly changing and deprecating my tweaks. Is that because I am old, or is it less common now? (Not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.)
TL;DR I too care much less about this, but understand why others do. I encourage them to keep doing it even if I don't personally spend time with it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/search?q=mac&restrict_sr=o...
https://qsapp.com/changelog.php
These posts were written decades ago:
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS.
> And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.
It keeps happening over and over again!
It's because the users are there. It's similar to things like YouTube. Every YouTuber complains about YouTube... but there is no other place where their random video is going to be recommended to a million strangers. (Twitch is similar.) So, they put up with it.
It boils down to what problem you want to solve. If you can figure out how to convince Mac users to switch to Linux, then you can be successful in your approach of "ditch Apple for being evil" or whatever. If you can't, then you have to find a new line of work (there is plenty of software engineering to be done that never touches an Apple product), or you have to put up with the poor developer experience.
It's also unlikely to be sunshine and roses on the other side of the fence. For everything that's bad about platform X, platform Y probably has just as many annoyances. If you're looking for perfection, you're going to have to remake the world in your image from scratch. That's a lot of work!
If you want to sell software for money, Linux app development is not the right business to be in.
Developing for Linux leaves you with a smaller range of users than Windows and Mac.
I actually really truly hope this happens. I want to see the same sort of love macOS gets from developers, showered on some/any open source OS (e.g. on some Linux/FreeBSD/etc distro).
I've been using Linux for nearly two decades, since I was 12 years old. (I still remember the excitement of installing Linux dual boot on my parents' PC years ago.)
I've been wishing and waiting for the age of the Linux desktop to come. It feels like it's so close, yet so far away.
(I've also been contemplating the benefit of me sinking the time into creating yet-another distro of my own -- one that's a lot different, built upon the features from NixOS and GoboLinux -- a distro that can hopefully be a truly compelling OS to wide range of folks...)
I've been thinking about this recently I'm not not sure the (vocal) Linux community would accept what it might take.
* Developers want to work on projects that interest them and provide a benefit to others.
* However, developers also want to make a good living so they need an audience willing to pay money and make it worth the time it takes to polish something to a decent finish.
* Some developers would prefer to keep their code closed-source.
(Again the vocal) Linux community all to often comes across as everything should be not only be free open-source also free to buy - it's almost a dirty word if you charge for software.
Additionally on the Apple-side of things:
* There's a culture of what constitutes a good app, it drives a certain perfectionism to the final polish that you rarely see in linux desktop apps. Personally I've not seen a huge amount of apps on linux that cater for different user audiences. As technical aware users we vastly over-estimate the amount of technical knowledge and patience an average user has to figure something out.
* Apple is now offering an audience from a multitude of devices. You can build your app for a watch, phone, tablet or desktop. e.g. if someone buys your app on the iPhone they are more likely to be interested in your apps for other devices so there's more opportunity to cross-sell.
Ubuntu is probably the closest I see to being able to set some proper direction here. But I've yet to see them double-down and really set their mind to it, they seem to set a direction hold for while then back-down and go another direction. From the outside, it seems like anytime they've really tried to do something different or _the horror_ make some money it seems to just rile up the vocal linux community.
It doesn't matter when some developers condone the forces that take advantage of them because of incentives(stockholders) or general apathy.
I've recently come to a shift on mentality and believe that such sentiments are meaningless. It's almost always the most parasitic and immoral of the players that succeed and continue to succeed. The worse they can treat the other parties, generally the better off they are. It's like a deer telling a lion it should consider eating more grass.
Yeah it sucks cause we're generally in the camp that is being taken advantage of. But due to the forces of capitalism and human nature, you can practically mathematically prove that your words will not be heeded, and to great great profit.
I’d just like to pop up a notification programmatically via a bash script. :)
https://github.com/julienXX/terminal-notifier
Since iOS 8 the system has had most of that functionality baked-in or is officially supported by Apple’s APIs for third-party devs. The only real things I feel I’m missing out right now on iOS 14 is raw FS access and easy sideloading.
Sure, sometimes a 3rd party comes along and makes a great product that once it is used, it feels like it is just something that should have always been there. Apple being Apple, they are going to want full control, so if they can't acquire the tool to do what they want, you know they will develop it internally. Every tech company does this. FB/Snap/Insta/etc have all borrowed/stolen/re-implemented.
If you want something that pops up on a large screen but isn't overly intrustive, a rectangle with text in it in the corner next to a menu icon to control them is what you're going to come up with.
And if you're Apple it'll be a rounded rectangle.
And Apple absolutely did not rip off Growl "pixel for pixel", the visual styles are totally different. I don't know where you even got that from?
I _think_ when Growl came out it was an open-source implementation of a notification UX that Apple had already demoed, either as a prototype or in some first-party apps, but it's just a vague memory. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
Note that Apple has dropped hints that they’d like users to move from macOS to iOS (“what’s a computer?”). Third party developers can’t build anything like Growl on iOS. There are a lot of reasons I don’t think Apple will ever be able to replace macOS with a closed system like iOS, but at least one of them is simply that a system as closed as iOS will inherently have a low ceiling for innovation (not enough room to innovate on the platform) therefore this innovation will be channeled into other platforms.
In other words, I think developers building features like Growl for macOS is highly relevant to the success of M1 Macs.
I mean, Toast notifications weren't even invented by Growl. It was nice software but this seems like hyperbole lol
Edit: also, IIRC Growl was originally called "Notification Center", which is the name that Apple later used for their implementation of similar features
Double edit: I should've RTFA which mentions my fun fact
Growl and a particular packaging software that provides auto updates had basically become a prerequisite for Mac apps at a certain point.
https://www.osnews.com/story/15442/interview-with-chris-fors...
Does MSN Messenger get the credit for that?
In a somewhat similar nostalgic vein, I remember haxies…
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Haxie
…and as linked in the blog post, Adium.
https://adium.im
Seemingly indispensable apps/applets/desk accessories that were either made unworkable by security changes, Sherlocking, or just the changing services we use. (Just look at those Adium services, and wistfully remember when XMPP was everywhere.)
I had some teeny, tiny contact list that took up hardly any space on screen. Something like: https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=1473
Compare to Facebook Messenger for Mac, which is gigantic, but doesn’t actually present more information. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/messenger/id1480068668?mt=12
I still use Alfred though every day. The CMD + Space for MacOS's version of it is the first thing I disable on new installs.
Anyone know why support for Matrix was never added to Adium? I never quite understood that given its robust support for XMPP.
When Growl moved to the Mac App Store, the writing was on the wall. I was so happy the team had a way to support themselves but the changes being made in Mac OS X (then known as OS X), even before Notification Center, definitely made stuff harder. After Notification Center and its adoption/similarity, and with the way macOS continued to restrict kernel extensions/modifications/plugins, it stopped being used as much by others. It ended up becoming difficult to install/run, and I gave up a few years ago, even though that meant some of my custom tools would no longer work the same way.
Huge kudos to the developers and the community. Seventeen years is a hell of a run.
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